


with you

by seeingrightly



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-08 23:31:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18904873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seeingrightly/pseuds/seeingrightly
Summary: Hermann relies on his rules about professionalism in the workplace to get through each day in the lab with Newt, but some days Newt tries harder to bend or outright break them. Other days, Hermann is aware he’s being stricter than necessary, but he cannot stop himself in time.





	with you

**Author's Note:**

> okay here's my fic from [the newmann zine](https://gumroad.com/newmannzine)!! i wrote this back in like november and boy is it a time capsule of the shit i was processing at the time. wild

 

 

 

Hermann relies on his rules about professionalism in the workplace to get through each day in the lab with Newt, but some days Newt tries harder to bend or outright break them. Other days, Hermann is aware he’s being stricter than necessary, but he cannot stop himself in time.

“Newton, I can barely hear myself think over your melodramatic sighing,” he says, adjusting his glasses rather than looking up.

“Oh, sorry for having feelings,” Newt replies shortly.

“You could have them at a lower volume or in a different location,” Hermann says, mostly to himself, though he immediately regrets it, because Newt predictably takes the bait.

“I don’t think I will. In fact, I think I’ll tell you all about how the person I’ve been seeing isn’t answering my calls, and normally I can handle that, but for  _ some _ stupid reason I told myself this one would be different -”

Hermann shouldn’t have said anything. He knew he wouldn’t like the information he ended up with. He has rules for a reason.

“ _ Newton _ , emotional outbursts are not professional -”

“Bullshit!” Newt shouts, his voice cracking. “You have emotional outbursts all the time. You just think they’re justified because they’re angry and smug and spiteful.”

Hermann sputters. Newt is not wrong, and Hermann hates him for it. Newt has always been an exception to his rules.

“I’m - you -” Hermann tries, and then he takes a deep breath and starts again. “I am aware when I’m being unprofessional myself. I thought we were choosing, in those moments, to slip into something more - more interpersonal, to - to benefit our intellectual -”

Newt lets out a frustrated noise and throws his hands in the air.

“Don’t try to make it sound fancy and justified,” he says. “You just want to be unprofessional when it’s convenient for you, never when it makes you uncomfortable, never if it involves being  _ nice _ , never when it’s about I want.”

Hermann freezes. He could lock himself back up, or he could ask. The rules are already plenty broken.

“What you want,” he repeats, quiet, barely looking at Newt.

Newt chokes very slightly. His face is red.

“You’ve already shown that you don’t care how I feel,” Newt says. “I’m not going to spell it out for you.”

He rips his gloves off dramatically and throws them onto his tray and leaves the lab.

 

Hermann has always needed to be the best he can, even before he was responsible for countless lives, even before he started school. He was warned at a young age not to give away more ammunition than his physical weakness already provided. But Newt made himself an exception to these rules straightaway, offering his own vulnerabilities, asking ceaselessly after Hermann’s, and on paper, with someone technically a stranger, it didn’t seem like such a violation of the rules. 

Then they met, and Newt knew so many of his secrets, had so much power over him, and Hermann withdrew into his rules. He knew they were an inconvenience to Newt. Perhaps it was willful ignorance not to see that Newt was struggling with something too.

 

Newt doesn’t go back to the lab all day. He heads out of the Shatterdome to grab some food and mope, and then he heads back to his room to mope some more, but there’s an envelope tucked into the door handle. It’s weathered, and it has his name and old address from Boston on the front, and the return address is Hermann’s. It’s sealed. It must be a letter Hermann never sent.

Newt opens his door as quickly as he can, sits down on the edge of his bed without removing his jacket, and rips the envelope open messily. There’s only one piece of paper inside, and it looks like it had been folded and unfolded many times before it was sealed away.

_ Newton, _

_ Normally I’m unsure what to say in response to your worries or your hurt emotions because I don’t want to be wrong or upset you further or… or come on too strong. But I’m going to be completely honest with you, for once. You shouldn’t have to put up with rude comments from your sheltered, transphobic, intellectually envious peers. Just as I shouldn’t have to deal with being pitted against my siblings or colleagues or everyone my father has ever met. And we don’t, actually, have to withstand it. We could up and leave. You and I. We wouldn’t have to do it together, but I’d like to. Where would you like to be instead, Newton? If we worked together like we’ve talked about I think we could really do it. Save the world.  _

_ But we have to save ourselves first. Ourselves and one another. Would you like that as much as I would? _

_ Yours, _

_ Hermann _

Newt runs his thumb over the  _ yours _ . Hermann had never signed a letter that way. Not that Newt knew of, until now. There could be other letters like this that he never sent to Newt, but held onto and kept with him for all these years, tucked away like his softer, more vulnerable feelings where Newt would never have known about them.

And now Hermann has handed this directly to him.

It’s late, too late to barge into the lab hoping to talk, but Hermann is still there, up on his ladder. Without turning around, he descends the ladder slowly when he hears Newt. Once he’s on the ground and turned around, Newt holds up the letter.

“Do you still have feelings for me?” he asks plainly.

“Do you have feelings for me?” Hermann asks, a bit archly, though his hands are clasped on the head of his cane and his lips are pressed tightly together.

“Sometimes,” Newt says. “Sometimes I hate you. I don’t know. It’s both.”

“Sometimes,” Hermann repeats, soft. “Yes, sometimes, but when I do, they’re like that.”

He gestures toward the letter in Newt’s hand, his expression more vulnerable than Newt has possibly ever seen it. Newt looks down at it before he speaks again.

“What do we do about it?”

“Nothing,” Hermann says, his expression closed off again when Newt looks back up at him. “There’s a war on. We can’t distract ourselves from our work. And the world might end anyway. What’s the point?”

He turns away, back toward the chalkboard.

“No,” Newt says. “You started this conversation. You don’t get to do that. You wouldn’t have shown me this letter if you didn’t still believe in any of what you wrote. We saved ourselves from the shit situations we were in and now we can change this one. We can choose to bring some joy into our lives for once, Hermann.”

“What joy?” Hermann asks, his voice cold, like he’s trying not to let anything else through. “We hate each other half of the time and that won’t change.”

“Yeah, but…” Newt steps closer to Hermann, not close enough to touch yet. “The other half of the time could be really good. I wanna get to know the part of you that wrote that letter. I knew it was there when we were writing, but you haven’t let me see it since we’ve met. Let me see it, dude.”

“I,” Hermann says, and then he clears his throat. “I don’t know if I can. Giving that letter to you was hard enough.”

“Why’d you give it to me at all if you weren’t going to follow through?”

Hermann closes his eyes and lowers his head.

“I am trying,” he says quietly. “I’m not used allowing myself to… to be vulnerable. You know that.”

“Hermann,” Newt says, taking another step closer. “Have I done anything to make you regret telling me anything you’ve told me before?”

Hermann turns, then, to look at Newt over his shoulder, a frown on his face.

“No.”

“Okay,” Newt says, ignoring the fact that his breath speeds up just a little, that his heart beats a little faster, as he gets an idea. “Okay, Hermann, look. I know you have reasons why you gotta behave the way you gotta behave. But instead of thinking about what people in general might do if you - if you let yourself open up, can you try to think about what I, me specifically, would do? Would I do any of those things?”

Hermann licks his lips.

“Ah,” he says. “Has anyone ever told you that all the exceptionalism you were treated with as a child has made you overly-confident?”

“You, every day,” Newt replies, grinning, because Hermann’s shoulders have lowered from his ears and he’s turned fully toward Newt again.

“Newton, what do we do about this?” Hermann asks, straightforward and expectant, like he trusts whatever Newt’s answer will be this time.

“Whatever we want, I think,” Newt says. “But that means we gotta actually talk about it. Can you handle that?”

Slowly, Hermann holds out his hand, and Newt takes it.

“With you, I think I can,” Hermann says.

  
  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter [@coralbluenmbr5](https://twitter.com/coralbluenmbr5)


End file.
